Effects

Shatter

A Voronoi explosion for any layer — drawings, text, video, whole groups — with cracks that spread, chunks that tumble in 2.5D, and a floor to land on.

Shatter fractures whatever the layer shows into flying pieces. And “whatever” is literal: by the time the effect runs, the layer has already been rendered to pixels — so a video frame, a painting, drawn vectors, live text, a nested comp or a whole group’s composite all shatter identically, with nothing to configure. Transparency is respected automatically: an exploded piece of text is letter-shaped, because a shard lying over empty canvas simply is empty.

Like the other simulations, it’s scrub-proof — every chunk’s whole flight is a closed form in its age. Scrub backwards through your own explosion, jump to the end, export: identical pixels every time.

The one big dial

Force — how hard the blast throws the pieces — sits above the tabs. Everything else shapes what that force does.

Fracture tab — how it breaks

Pattern deals the cracks, and each distribution reads as a different material:

• Glass — a polar web centred on the impact: small dense cells at the contact point opening into big ones at the rim. Windows, screens, ice.
• Chunks — a jittered grid, organic masonry with no preferred direction. Concrete, plaster, brick, dirt.
• Splinters — few rings, many angles: long thin shards all pointing back at the impact. Wood, bone, splintering ice.

Pieces (4–1500) is both the look and the cost knob. Crack Wander bends the cracks off straight lines — straight cracks look computed; wandering ones look broken. The Epicenter is dragged in the viewport onto the thing that breaks (a face, a window, a word); the ring around its crosshair isn’t decoration — it’s drawn at the radius the blast front has actually reached on the current frame, so scrubbing shows the shockwave sweeping outward.

Two timing controls make it cinematic: Blast Frame (before it, the plate is untouched, bit for bit) and Cracks First — frames of cracking that spread across the intact plate before it blows.

Map is the art-direction channel: point it at a layer whose brightness decides which pieces go and how hard — white goes first and hardest, black stays standing. Paint the map, hide it in the timeline (it’s read as a control, not drawn), and the explosion obeys. Map Strength dials how much it overrules the blast.

Blast tab — the throw

Shockwave — how fast the front travels outward (px/s); pieces launch as it reaches them, so the explosion sweeps across the plate instead of firing all at once (0 = everything at once). Pop Out sends force toward the camera; Scatter randomizes each piece’s direction and speed; Spin is in-plane rotation and Tumble is end-over-end 3D flipping — which works even with Depth at 0, because a flat piece foreshortens as it turns, exactly like paper.

Motion tab — the flight

Gravity (negative floats debris upward), Drag (air resistance), and two you’ll keyframe:

• Speed — a time multiplier on the explosion’s own clock. Ramp it down for slow motion mid-blast; take it below zero and the explosion runs backwards, re-assembling the plate.
• Piece Life — seconds a piece survives before shrinking away (0 = forever).

Floor puts a line (dragged in the viewport) for rubble to land, bounce and pile up on, with Bounce and Friction. The panel states the trade honestly: with the floor on, Drag is ignored — bounces are ballistic, and this effect never guesses.

Look tab — the material

Depth gives pieces thickness in pixels — above zero they grow extruded side walls as they tumble, shaded by Shading. Debris adds a fine pass of small shards off the breaking edges. Freeze at Blast makes flying pieces carry the picture as it was at the blast frame — reach for it the moment you shatter footage, because live video playing inside shards that already exploded reads as a mistake (the unbroken part always keeps playing). Animate On holds the explosion on ones, twos or threes — it defaults to ones, unusually, because debris moves fast enough that held frames read as strobing; set twos deliberately when the shot is cel work.

Break Apart — pieces become real layers

The Fracture tab’s Break apart… button converts the fracture into actual layers — one per piece, each a live copy of the layer masked to its own shard, collected in a group. The picture looks identical afterwards; you just have every piece to animate by hand. The original is hidden, not deleted. (Capped at 200 pieces, and the app will gently suggest fewer — most hand-animated shatters use a few dozen.)

The 18 presets

A preset is a complete look; your seed, epicenter, blast frame, floor height and Amount survive it, so trying looks on never moves the explosion off the thing you aimed it at.

Recipe — title smash. Type a title. Add Shatter, drag the Epicenter onto the first letter, set Blast Frame to where the beat lands and Cracks First to ~8 — the audience sees the cracks race across the text for a third of a second, then it blows.

Recipe — reveal by reassembly. Apply any blast preset, then keyframe Speed from −1 at the start of the shot to 0 at the reveal frame. The debris flies backwards into place and becomes the picture.